“Pretty much,” Andy was saying. “One thing you can do is what they call a water birth. You submerge the hatching site, and when it happens, they kind of float off and it contains them—”
But Ken would want to set up an operating room, probably, scrub his hands up to the elbows the way the doctors in the webshows were always doing, boil the knives and stuff—
“—assuming, of course, that there’s only the one hatch site—”
Wes’s instincts screamed at him, suddenly, to just GET IT OFF. But how? How—Violet. She had a knife. She had—
He staggered toward Violet and grabbed her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, not recognizing the strength that suddenly powered him. There the knife was, tucked into a pocket on her utility belt. He snatched it with tingling fingers—
“Grab him!” Andy yelled.
“Man, I don’t—”
Wes twisted in the hands that were suddenly gripping him, trying to turn the knife toward his right arm, but he was using his stupid hand, and he couldn’t—quite—get there. He wasn’t capable of actually cutting the arm off, probably (stupid to think he could, he thought, sweating and grinding his teeth), didn’t have the strength, probably he’d pass out, but if he could just dig the blade tip into the swollen part and let off some of the goddamn pressure—
“He’s trying to cut himself!” Marta cried.
He went down on his back, hard. Breath knocked out of him. As he struggled to inhale, something came down on his wrist and his hand popped open. The knife was removed from his still-grasping fingers.
“He’s gone fucking nuts!” someone—Berto, he thought—said.
His cheek flared with sharp pain. “Hey. Hey.” Now the other cheek. “Hey. Dude, snap out of it.”
Wes blinked. Rasped another few shallow breaths. He focused his eyes in time to see the hand coming toward him again and flinched away.
“Jesus Christ!” Yes, that was Berto. “He’s going to try to fucking kill us! No way in hell he’s coming in with us. No way.”
“He’s not trying to kill anyone,” Andy said. He touched Wes’s face with surprising gentleness and peered into his eyes. “You calm now?”
Wes shrugged. Then nodded. “I—I don’t know—”
“I know you don’t,” Andy said. “This can happen,” Andy said, raising his voice for the others’ benefit. “There’s a psychological term for it, probably. I can’t remember. But a frenzy sets in. I’ve heard of guys hacking their own legs off.”
“Jesus.” Edie this time. Softly.
“So no knife for you,” Andy said to Wes.
“I don’t feel it now,” Wes said. He didn’t. That other desire seemed so alien and distant now that it had felt like being possessed.
“You probably will again,” Andy said. “And worse, as the hatching gets closer. That frenzy—I felt a version of it. Not something that caused me to try to hack myself to pieces, thank God. But I would have clawed my back to shreds if I could have.”
“Great,” Wes muttered.
“We need to get inside,” Ken said. “It’s getting dark. I need something to drink.”
“Wes comes, too,” Marta said firmly.
“Hell, no,” said Berto.
“This could be any of us,” Edie said. “You can’t treat him like that. He’s a human being.”
“Yeah, and so am I,” Berto said. “And so is everyone else here. I don’t see what putting all our lives at risk will accomplish. He just needs to stay out here until we know what’s up.”
Edie’s dark eyes were flashing in the diminishing light. “We don’t have any camping gear. We don’t even have a blanket. You just want to leave him down here alone with nothing over his head, nothing to protect him?”
“You can stay down with him if you want,” Berto said. “And we can probably find some things in the chalet. Bring him down food and water, a sleeping bag, whatever he needs. I’m not saying he can’t have some of what we’ve got. I’m saying he doesn’t bring that fucking diseased arm of his into the one safe haven we’ve got.”
“I agree with Berto,” Ken said.
“You are monsters,” said Marta.
“And you haven’t lost anyone yet,” Berto said. “So shut up.”
Wes felt the moment coming when he’d have to do the decent thing again, the thing he could live with, even if it meant not living. A sleeping bag out here wouldn’t be so bad compared to the car trunk. It wouldn’t even be so bad compared to the shed in Ruby City. At least he’d lie there in the knowledge that he could get up and walk twenty feet if he wanted to. And then twenty more, if he wanted that.
(All the way to the Wall. Where he’d be promptly shot.)
But still.
“He goes up with us,” Andy said.
“I don’t think that’s up to you,” Berto said.
“Actually, I do.” Andy had his big scarred arms crossed and a little smile on his face. Though his action was on Wes’s behalf, Wes nonetheless registered a flash of uneasiness. This was the man who had driven Wendy, Anastasia, Lee, and Jesse to the Wall to be shot, after all. “I have the codes for this door. And the upstairs door. I know how to get the generator running. I know the codes to the supply pantries. You want access to any of it, you need me.”
“Why would you do that for him?” Berto asked.
“Because I can,” Andy said. “And because I don’t like you.”
Twenty-Two
The chalet, though modestly appointed by the standards of most OLE travelers, was paradise after the last week. The living room, dining area, and kitchen were all one open space, lined on both sides by windows offering panoramic views of the east and west, the west now singed by the very last of the day’s light. Long, broad sofas formed a U around a huge stone fireplace. Gas logs, Edie saw. Wouldn’t want an open flue in this place, of course. The coffee table was huge—a rough-hewn timber base topped with a giant stone slab. How on earth did they get that up here? she wondered. It made her tired to think of it.